KRISTA HARRIS
Painting
Lives and works in Southwest Colorado
(b. 1954, American)
“I am always experimenting with materials and questioning ways of working. Different and unusual combinations of wax, tar, plaster, shellac, natural pigments or contemporary graffiti tools are fair game. Hardware stores are potential art supply stores. I’m on a never-ending quest to surprise myself. It keeps things interesting for me. I don’t even start my work in the same way. Sometimes I’ll be working in line and mark, black and white on the wall on canvas or paper, the next I am pouring paint on a canvas on the floor and moving it around with squeegees or brooms. So even though my work ends up being similar, I usually take a different path, and I love getting lost along the way.”
ARTIST STATEMENT
Making art has always felt more like breathing or sleeping – just an extension of life for me…something biologically necessary or hard wired in my DNA. It’s how I process the world around me–how I take in the visual, emotional, social and sensory experiences and try to reconfigure them in a new way.
What continues to fascinate me and is the visual thread in my work, is capturing movement, motion or momentum. Suspending a moment, so that it verges on both becoming and dissolving, allows me to hold it briefly then let it go. The process of manipulating time by abstracting painted marks and layering translucent color often feels like part painting and part science experiment.
Visual eavesdropping is the best way I can describe my work and my process. I’m driven by an intense curiosity about places and the ways in which they connect, divide or define us. How do we fit in, what’s our place in the world? Is it where we grow up or some adopted location that we connect with on a deeper level? The individual and unique parts of a place…it’s culture and traditions, the languages, ethnic and architectural components, the quality of light, the color of the wind, the food, climate and terrain are all visual pieces of the puzzle.A lifelong case of wanderlust has left me with a visual scrapbook of sights, sounds, smells and bits of dialogue which seem to sneak into my work. I don’t intentionally set out to recreate a scene and I’m often surprised to see them when they appear o canvas. It’s rarely even a single image but bits and pieces jumbled together. The paintings become blurry postcards and mashed together maps that dissolve, shift and reassemble themselves just for a moment before moving on.
ABOUT
- Krista Harris is an expressionist painter whose work blurs lines between abstraction and the natural world. Richly layered and nuanced surfaces, interwoven with line and mark, seem to suspend a moment in time – something almost recognizable, suggestive and mysterious, everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
- Her artwork is widely collected and in many private collections both nationally and internationally.
- She exhibits in prestigious galleries across the country and is included in corporate collections such as the Duke Memorial Cancer Center, Durham NC; Northern Trust Bank, Chicago, IL; and the Ritz Carlton Hotel, Grand Cayman Island.
- She has participated in international art fairs including SOFA NYC, Chicago and Santa Fe as well as Palm Beach International Art Fair.
- She received her BFA in Painting from East Carolina University in 1977.
PRESS + MEDIA
Krista Harris: Inside the Studio
[The Woven Tale Press]
Video: Krista Harris 2020
[Youtube]